The next major Republican primary will take place in South Carolina on February 20. “If you are not ready to play,” Sen. Lindsay Graham told an audience while introducing Jeb Bush at an event in the state this week, “don’t come to South Carolina.”

He was talking about the Republican candidates, of course, but he might as well have been talking about the Grand Old Party itself. Saturday’s South Carolina primary race will be not just a test to see who is the strongest candidate in the pack but also a test of how strong the party establishment still is—or perhaps more accurately, just how weak it has become.

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Ever since 1980, and up until 2012, South Carolina had been a Republican “firewall” of sorts—the state where insurgents who did well in Iowa or New Hampshire were shoved to the back of the pack and the party-preferred candidate rose to the top, with momentum coming into Super Tuesday and then onward to the convention. The state’s party establishment was strong, the voters reliable, and time and time again, the firewall worked. In 1980, South Carolina was where Ronald Reagan revitalized his campaign against George H.W. Bush and John Connally. In 1988, South Carolina helped Vice President George H.W. Bush put down challenges from Senator Robert Dole and evangelist Pat Robertson. President Bush and Senator Robert Dole used South Carolina to so the same against Patrick Buchanan in 1992 and 1996, respectively. Most famously, Gov. George W. Bush depended on South Carolina to crush Sen. John McCain.

In 2012, that all changed, when a growing Tea Party had weakened the party establishment significantly, and Newt Gingrich, funded by a billionaire of his own, had resources enough to run a ruthless, effective campaign and defeat GOP favorite Mitt Romney. This year, establishment candidates are in trouble again. Following Sen. Ted Cruz’s victory in Iowa and Donald Trump’s decisive success in New Hampshire, the candidates preferred by party leaders—Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Jeb Bush—are all scrambling to survive.

Given what happened in 2012, this year is a crucial test to see whether the party establishment has the chops to make a comeback and preserve the South Carolina firewall—or whether we are now officially in an era of free-for all Republican competition that party elites cannot control.

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The brainchild of the South Carolina primary as we know it was the bad boy of Republican politics, South Carolinian Lee Atwater, who in 1980 elevated this contest onto the national political main stage. Before 1980, South Carolina selected its GOP nominee through a party convention, which had been controlled by Senator Strom Thurmond and his machine.

In 1979, Atwater, an up and coming political consultant, saw the caucuses and primaries had become the mechanism for picking party nominees, rather than the smoke-filled rooms of the party conventions, and concluded that it was time for South Carolina to join the primary fray.

But Atwater didn’t really want to give full control to the voters: He still believed the new primary system could be a vehicle for national party leaders to bolster their candidate going into Super Tuesday. He had seen how Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan had challenged the major party candidates in 1976 by winning in caucuses and primaries as they appealed to Americans who didn’t ordinarily participate in politics and by using the news media to communicate directly to voters, bypassing party elites. South Carolina, according to Atwater, would be a way for the party establishment to gain control of the new primary process by having a state where it could counteract the free-wheeling decisions of earlier states.

So in 1979, Atwater worked with Republican South Carolina Congressman Carroll Campbell to push for a full-scale primary that would come after Iowa and New Hampshire but before Super Tuesday—both late and early enough to completely reset the trajectory of the primary race.

How was Atwater so confident his strategy would work? He knew that South Carolina had one of the most powerful Republican Party operations. The party in the state had started to take form in 1964, when Dixiecrat Sen. Strom Thurmond famously switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP. That year, the right-wing Barry Goldwater put this state into the Republican column. Four years later, Richard Nixon won the state once again and in 1974, the state elected a Republican, James Edwards, to be the first Republican governor since Reconstruction. The state’s party quickly developed a formidable apparatus and moved to the forefront of the party’s political presence in a region that had once been totally dominated by the Democratic Party. By the 1970s, the Republican Party had become a major political force in the state.

It also helped that the South Carolina electorate was home to a wide variety of conservatives. There were religious conservatives, who hovered around Bob Jones University, an epicenter of right wing operations. There were fiscal conservatives who still believed in balancing the budget. The tourism, textile industry and defense industry had nurtured a business community whose members were determined to obtain supply side tax cuts. The large presence of military families in the states also produced strong support for hawkish views of foreign policy. This was a state where racial tension also ran deep. A substantial part of the electorate in this state where the Confederate Flag flew high still had little sympathy for federal civil rights legislation.

In this way, South Carolina was much more representative of the GOP base than New Hampshire and Iowa—and was thus less likely to deliver a surprise victory. But more than that, winning in South Carolina required a candidate to muster the organizational and financial tools necessary to build a broad coalition of all the different factions that existed within the conservative movement—and that would be hard for “outsider” candidates to pull off.

In August 1979, South Carolina Republicans agreed to Atwater’s plan. The party switched to a primary system scheduled to take place on Saturday, March 8, 1980, just days before Super Tuesday so that the winner would get a huge boost at a key moment. “To me,” explained Haley Barbour, one of the up-and-coming political operatives in the state, “South Carolina is the most important of the Southern primaries because of chronology. It’s three days before the Alabama, Florida and Georgia primaries, and it’s bound to have an impact on the rest of them.”